Towards Embodied Performance: Directing and the Art of Composition

Towards Embodied Performance invites directors and other generative performance makers to experiment with making their own original, visually stunning, sonically immersive, and physically rigorous embodied performance. Through historical context, the author’s 30-plus years of experience, and original interviews with leading theatre artists, this book sets the stage for a new generation of artists building boundary-breaking work.Directors are often categorized into one of only two frameworks: the Stanislavskian director, whose method is based on text analysis and character wants and needs, and the “auteur” director, whose work might focus on visual spectacle at the expense of text or character objectives.This book argues that the director of embodied performance fuses these two approaches, acting as the author of the event.In Part I, readers will explore the core elements of embodied performance - space, time, body, language, and action - through a lens that bridges traditional directin